A defiant Prabowo Subianto, accompanied by coalition partners and lawyers, turned up in court yesterday to challenge the July 9 presidential election result that declared Joko Widodo the winner by a huge margin of 8.4 million votes.

The Prabowo camp insisted that he had won 50.25 per cent of the 133 million valid votes cast, beating his rival by a margin of more than 700,000 votes.

His lawyers, alleging that there had been "structured, systematic and massive" cheating, demanded that the Constitutional Court declare the result invalid.

They also wanted recounts at 56,000 poll booths they claimed had been tampered with, affecting nearly 23 million votes.

"Our case stands based on the massive tampering that has resulted in significant losses for us," lawyer Maqdir Ismail told the court.

But the nine-judge panel took the Prabowo camp to task over its submission, citing vagueness, spelling errors, shoddy referencing and a lack of concrete evidence.

While the legal challenge is Prabowo's last-ditch bid to overturn the result, many see it as a face-saving way to concede defeat by sowing doubt about the Election Commission and the electoral process.

The former general has neither conceded defeat nor congratulated his rival.

But the odds are against the 62-year-old, given that the Constitutional Court has never overturned a national election result and that the Election Commission was praised for its transparency in this year's election.

Yesterday, Prabowo blamed "foreign intervention" for the election result and claimed the electoral process would not be legitimate if the court did not scrutinise it.

"Our coalition feels hurt by these (dishonest) practices... some of these only happen in totalitarian countries like North Korea," he told the court in a 13-minute speech.

"What we are seeing is a rape of democratic rights," he added, saying that he had up to 10,000 witnesses to back his claims.

But the judges' quick retorts suggest that they are keen to avoid a messy legal process.

Judge Ahmad Fadlil demanded clarity, saying: "Do you want the court to decide on ruling a revote or a recount?"

Fellow judge Aswanto ticked off the camp for being vague.

"You refer to 'indications' of money politics but 'indications' are not concrete enough," he said. "Sharpen (the language), avoid using words with many meanings; use those which are precise."